D 20 
.H67 
Copy 1 



Advance Sheets 



Preface 



The History of Nations 



Henry Cabot Lodge, Ph.D., LL.D. 






Preface 



to 



The History of Nations 



By 



Henry Cabot Lodge, Ph.D., LL.D. 




1904 

John D. Morris and Company 
Philadelphia 



■ ■ . * • . » > 



-lies Received 
1904 

^ Copyright Enlry 
ASS Ct XXo. No. 
COPY ff 



Copyright, 1904 

By 

Henry Cabot Lodge 



Preface 



to 



The History of Nations 

by 
Henry Cabot Lodge, Ph.D., LL.D. 



The purpose of this work is to give in compact form the 
history of all modern nations and of the states and civilizations 
from which they have sprung. Each volume is a work of authority 
hy a writer of eminence. All not originally written especially for 
this series have been carefully edited, and, wherever necessary, 
the narrative has been brought down to the present day by addi- 
tions and notes embodying the results of the most recent re- 
search and investigation. The intention is to offer in these vol- 
umes a general survey of history in a compendious and agree- 
able form. The value of the material thus furnished and thus 
arranged is undoubted; but much more depends upon the 
manner in which it is presented, the deductions drawn by the 
author and the use that is then made of it by the reader than 
upon the facts and observations recorded. In other words, the 
true importance of any history or of any collection of histories lies 
in the conception of the development and attainment of man 
which is therein set forth or which we ourselves are enabled to 
draw from it. What we mean by the word history and what it 
says to us as a whole are more essential than any disconnected 
knowledge of details, however accurate and however minute. 



2 PREFACE 

Our first step, therefore, on beginning any study of original 
sources or of historical writings ought to be as clear a definition 
as possible of our own conception of history itself as well as of its 
meaning and purposes, assuming as we must that it possesses 
both these attributes. 

It has been wisely and wittily said that "one fact is gossip 
and two related facts are history," an aphorism very characteristic 
of the scientific age in which it was uttered. But the saying, with 
all its truth, like many other brilliant generalizations, may easily 
be pressed too far and contains an implication which is anything 
but sound. It may be quite true that collections of unrelated 
facts, whether trivial or important, or of facts presented without 
any philosophical sense or any "look before or after," merit their 
definition as "gossip"; yet we should do very wrong to under- 
estimate this same "gossip," upon which, in common parlance, 
the name history is so often bestowed. History of the "gossip" 
variety is, to begin with, the foundation of all other history, upon 
which it will be necessary to say something more later. "Gossip," 
moreover, whether light or serious, is in its best forms, especially 
in the guise of memoirs, biographies and personal anecdotes, 
extremely entertaining. While it is read, perhaps, only for the 
sakeofreading.it helps us to enjoy life and may also teach us to en- 
dure it. It has, too, a real value in an instructive way although how 
great that value shall be depends upon him who receives the infor- 
mation rather than upon the writer thereof. Even if one gathers 
from "gossip" nothing but an unphilosophical, unscientific knowl- 
edge of people and events, much is gained; for the man who knows 
something of the history of the race and of those who have played 
a part in the past not only has widened his own interest in the 
world about him, but, other things being equal, is a proportion- 
ately more agreeable companion to those whom he encounters 
in the journey of life. Dr. Johnson on more than one occasion 
defended desultory reading, to which he himself was very prone, 
and a wiser man than he laid it down as a maxim many years 
before that "reading maketh a full man." Therefore, let us not 
give way too much to the nineteenth century contention about 
scientific history, with its array of causes and deductions, theories 
and results, or to that other dogma of the same period, much in 
favor with writers who lack the historic imagination, that "pic- 



PREFACE 



turesque" history is a poor and trivial thing, and that, above all, 
history must be "judicial" — a bit of cant quite as objectionable as 
that concerning the "dignity of history" which imposed upon our 
ancestors and which we have laughed out of court. There was a 
good deal of sound truth in Byron's remark about Mitford: "Hav- 
ing named his sins, it is but fair to state his virtues — learning, 
research, wrath and partiality. I call the latter virtues in a writer 
because they make him write in earnest." The history, indeed, 
to be defined as "gossip," or which remains or becomes "gossip" 
in the mind of him who reads, has also its very real merits of 
entertainment and of instruction as well as of imparting a knowl- 
edge which, however desultory and disconnected, is a good thing 
for him who has it and makes the possessor thereof more desirable 
to his fellows. The "Memoirs of St. Simon" may be in themselves 
the merest gossip that was ever set down, as they are certainly 
the most copious; but he who has looked upon these vivid pictures 
of a vanished society, whether he is imaginative enough to see 
shining upon them the red light of after years or not, has enlarged 
his own mind, widened his own interests, quickened his own 
intelligence and made himself more attractive to others by follow- 
ing across these many pages the pageant of the great Louis and 
his court. 

We may, indeed, go much further, if we would do full 
justice to "gossip," by remembering what has already been sug- 
gested, that the worth of any record of the past, no. matter how 
trivial or fond, depends not merely upon the mind of the writer, but 
upon that of the reader as well. According to the canons of those 
modern extremists who would make history as destitute of literary 
quality as a museum of comparative anatomy, Herodotus and 
Suetonius, Joinville and Froissart, Pepys and Walpole and Frank- 
lin would be rejected with contempt as historians and set down 
as mere retailers of idle "gossip" or, at best, rather untrustworthy 
"original sources." It may be readily admitted that not one of 
them ever attempted to trace properly the sequence of cause and 
effect or to draw a truly scientific deduction. They were all prob- 
ably quite innocent of any knowledge of their duties in that respect; 
yet not only the world but history in the truest sense would be 
much poorer and certainly much duller without them. The infinite 
charm which they all possess — from the ancient Greek, wandering 



4 PREFACE 

about his little world, tablets in hand and ears open to the tales 
of the temple, the court or the market place, down to the Ameri- 
can boy seeking employment as a printer in London, where he 
was one day to determine the fate of empires — attracts and will 
always attract everyone who cares for literature and to whom 
humanity and humor and the life of a dead past appeal. To 
those who look with considerate eyes into these old writers of 
tales and purveyors of "gossip," these simple chroniclers and 
delightfully egotistic diarists, there rise up pictures of times long 
past, of social conditions and modes of thought long dead, as well 
as revelations of human character and motives, rich in suggestions 
of historic cause and effect and more fertile in explanation of the 
fate and meaning of man upon earth than acres of catalogued 
facts scientifically classified, or reams of calendared State papers 
arranged with antiquarian skill. The catalogues and calendars 
are work of high value, yet they have no importance until the 
seeing eye of the real historian has torn out the heart of their 
mystery. The gossip of the Greek and the Roman, of the 
mediaeval chroniclers and the eighteenth century diarists, have 
delighted and instructed thousands who never write and to whom 
the solemn words "scientific history" have no meaning. At the 
same time, to those who would seek the deeper meanings and 
link together cause and effect, they offer far more than barren 
collections of indiscriminate facts, no matter how well or how 
scientifically arranged. Herodotus may be loose and inaccurate 
and Suetonius may be malignant and filled with error, but what 
light shines from the one upon the ancient civilizations of Asia 
Minor and of Egypt, and how could we ever realize the dark 
shadows which overhung the glories of the Csesars without the 
grim pictures of the other? We should fare ill in any attempt to 
understand from mouldering parchments alone the wonderful 
century which gave to France her royal saint and the art that 
produced the Sainte Chapelle if we could not read the simple 
words of Joinville. The English and French wars live for us in the 
rambling pages of Froissart; Pepys, besides laying bare a human 
soul, tells more of what the restoration really was than all the 
professed historians then or since; in Walpole, greatest of English 
letter writers, we know the England of the three Georges, and 
in Franklin we can discover the secret of the loss of the American 



PREFACE 5 

colonies. In all alike we get the atmosphere of the times, we 
learn to know man as he then was in those various countries and 
widely separated periods. Such knowledge can only be obtained 
from men who had literary power, observation and imagination. 
Without such knowledge "scientific history" cannot make a be- 
ginning even, cannot advance a step. With it the seeker for cause 
and effect can find as long a chain as he may wish to forge and as 
many deductions as he may desire to draw. The "gossip" which 
is also literature is the best foundation for history and that which 
is not literature is, after all, merely a collection of the unclassified 
facts so dear to the scientific historian, who thinks they can be 
made alive by arrangement alone. Let us not, then, be too quick 
to throw aside "gossip" without discrimination, for when it has a 
high literary quality it will outlive scientific history in the hearts 
of men, and will, in the long run, teach them more about them- 
selves and about their race than the wisest collector and classifier 
of facts who ever' lived, because men will read the "gossip" and 
fall asleep over the reasoned catalogue. 

So much, then, for the unscientific, unphilosophical, discon- 
nected, desultory history, whether great literature or not, which 
we are quite ready to call "gossip," and to speak of patronizingly 
as an inferior thing, but which most of us in our heart of hearts 
really like better than any other. Let us leave it with all good 
wishes for the pleasure it has given us and the profound instruc- 
tion it has offered to those who seek instruction diligently, and 
come to the superior function of history, the true history which, 
relying solely upon itself and not upon the reader, aspires not only 
to instruct and inform, but to explain man to himself. Of its im- 
portance there can be no doubt ; still less of its seriousness. History 
in this aspect may easily fail to be amusing; if it is not literature 
also it will probably fail to be anything else, but properly written it 
cannot be otherwise than profoundly important and interesting. 
Here in this History of Nations and in countless other volumes 
lie the garnered facts, ever being increased and ever shifting in 
their proportionate importance and in their relation to each 
other. In dealing with these facts, What is the purpose of his- 
tory if in itself it is to be of any real value in the largest sense? 
There have been many answers to this question, many essays, 
most of them it must be confessed rather dreary, replying at 



O PREFACE 

length as to the functions and uses of history. Setting aside 
as alien to what we are now considering all that vast and valua- 
ble mass which may be classified as "gossip," and which is at 
the lowest estimate certainly raw material, the object of history or 
the study of history now under consideration may be briefly 
stated. There is, to begin with, the old, classical and conven- 
tional phrase that history is philosophy teaching by example, which 
means little or nothing. Napoleon said that "history was the 
fable agreed upon," the quick utterance of a great genius who 
had never gone beyond the "gossip." Disraeli, readiest and most 
epigrammatic, perhaps, of the more modern public men — cer- 
tainly the most un-English — saw use in history only as an ex- 
planation of the past, an excellent definition, but so limited as to 
make history of but little worth if it cannot pass these bounds. 
Emerson, in his vaguely beautiful essay, defines history as the 
record of man, tells us that we are history and that history is 
ourselves; in more prosaic words, that history is the explanation 
of the present. Add this definition to that of Disraeli and we have 
advanced a goodly distance, but history must be yet more and 
must go further still if it is to fulfill its whole function. 

In a very recent essay Mr. George Trevelyan has described 
the function of history in a manner as fine and a style as perfected 
and beautiful as his conception of the work of the historian is 
noble and true. The three functions of history he defines as teach- 
ing the lessons of political wisdom, spreading the knowledge of 
past ideas and of great men, and, most important of all, "causing 
us in moments of diviner solitude to feel the poetry of time." The 
first two functions are of great worth, and it was never more 
necessary to preach their virtue and necessity than now, but they 
are the more immediate achievements of history inseparable from 
it when rightly written, and do not reach that larger and more 
ultimate purpose which I am seeking to find and express here. 
It is in the third aspect that Mr. Trevelyan touches history in its 
highest range, when he says that it ought to make us feel the 
poetry of time and the passing of the race through many epochs 
along the highway of eternity: 

" Each changing place with that which goes before, 
In sequent toil all forward do contend." 



PREFACE 7 

Such is the poetry of time, and there lies hid the secret of man 
and his relation to the universe. 

To be more explicit, history must, it is true, explain the past 
as Disraeli wished and the present as Emerson desired. But that 
is not enough. Perhaps it is impossible that it should do more; 
but history, if it is carried to the full height of our conception, 
ought also to enable us to see into the future, to calculate in some 
degree the movement of the race as we now calculate the orbit 
of the stars, and read in the past, whether dim or luminous, a con- 
nected story and a pervading law. In other words, history in the 
ultimate analysis must give us a theory of the universe as well as 
of human life and action. Has this been done? Have these 
masses of facts, gathered of late with such ant-like diligence, yet 
been brought into such connection? have they been so ordered 
and mastered as to tell a coherent story and thus explain to us 
the course of human life and conduct? If they have not, then 
history has thus far failed of its final purpose in whole or in part. 

In the wonderful nineteenth century just past we have gone 
clearly beyond the simple-minded writers of annals and chronicles. 
We have learned, indeed, to regard annals and chronicles, as well 
as biographies and statistics and every phase and form of human 
activity, as primarily so much raw material, so many observations 
to be sifted and compared and grouped until they afford a theory or 
explanation of some sort for the man or the incident or the events 
to which they relate. But have we by this method as yet deduced 
a result which really explains at once the past and the present, 
which makes us not only feel the poetry of time, but which also 
throws a bright light along the pathway of the future? Have we 
attained in any degree to a working hypothesis which shall make 
clear to us the development and fate of man upon earth? Unless 
we can answer these questions quite clearly in the affirmative then 
history has not yet fulfilled her whole mission, and still sits by 
the roadside like the Sphinx waiting for the traveler who can 
guess her riddle. 

It is a riddle worth guessing. None more so. The genius 
who will draw out from the welter of recorded time a theory which 
will explain to man both himself and his relation to the universe 
need fear comparison with no other that has ever lived, for he 
must not only make the great discovery, but he must clothe it in 



8 PREFACE 

words which will live as literature and touch it with an imagina- 
tion which will reach the heart of humanity and endure like the 
poetry of those who sang for the people when the world was 
young. 

Let us see, however, what has been accomplished; let us at 
least try to measure "the petty done, the undone vast." We 
have brought together immense masses of facts, in some cases far 
too many — so much so that their very density has caused men not 
infrequently to lose their way among details, and, having deprived 
them of the sense of proportion, has led them to mistake the par- 
ticular for the general. We are, indeed, more likely now to suffer 
from having too many facts than too few. By no possibility can 
we have in anything which relates to human affairs all the facts. 
Even some of the most tangible and external escape us; and of the 
tangle of passions, emotions and desires which so largely deter- 
mine the course of human events we can know but little, and must 
always be content with large inferences and with a psychology of 
the masses because that of individuals, except in a few isolated 
instances, is lost to us forever. Unable, therefore, to know all 
the facts, we must proceed by selection and by generalizations 
based on those dominating types which have been chosen through 
the instinct and the imagination, the very qualities that no amount 
of mere training will give. The besetting danger of the time lies 
in the tendency to reverence mere heaps of facts and to treat one 
fact, because it is such, as equal in value to every other: a doctrine 
much enhanced by those who would separate history from litera- 
ture and make it nothing more than a series of measurements or 
a classified catalogue. Facts in themselves have no value except 
as the material from which the men of high and co-ordinating 
intelligence can, by selecting and rejecting, bring forth a theory, 
a philosophy, or a story which the world will be able to read and 
understand because it is helped to do so by all the charm and all 
the light which literary art and historic imagination can give. A 
"scientific history," crammed with facts, well arranged, but un- 
readable, and at the same time devoid of art and selection, is, per- 
haps, as sad a monument of misspent labor as human vanity can 
show. None the less, after all deductions, the accumulation of 
facts, if properly used and then supplemented by all the resources 
of literary art, is absolutely essential to the highest history, for 



PREFACE 9 

laws governing human development rest, in large degree, like 
those of science, on the number of recorded observations, and find 
in that way control and correction. This is especially true in the 
case of archaeology, which is daily adding so enormously to our 
knowledge of early civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia 
Minor and in the Greek islands and peninsula, and which thus 
enables us to make those comparisons, stretching over long 
periods of time, upon which any stable theory of the movement 
of civilized mankind must ultimately rest. To this must also be 
added the scientific investigation into the condition of prehistoric 
man and of primitive tribes and races, our prehistoric contem- 
poraries, from which alone it is possible to draw the wildest deduc- 
tions as to the primary development of what we call civilized man. 
To put this first proposition in a few words, we have in the last one 
hundred years gathered, and in a large measure arranged intelli- 
gently, the necessary material to which we are still adding, and 
which is an essential preliminary to writing history in the highest 
sense of the word. 

We have also passed definitely and finally out of the stage 
where history was considered too solemn and too dignified to have 
any of the attractions of what is frankly "gossip," and yet re- 
mained nothing but a stringing together of facts, as if they were 
single beads, each separated from the others by a dividing and 
impassable knot. The habit is now ingrained in all writers of 
history, even if they are merely dealing with an episode or prepar- 
ing a monograph, to lead up from cause to effect, to point out the 
sources of an event, the culmination of the various compelling 
forces and the ultimate results, or else to arrange the narrative in 
such wise that the reader must perforce draw his own deductions 
and thus learn the lesson which the author desires to impart, 
This method of dealing with history varies, of course, most 
widely in the extent of its application. It may be applied to a 
single incident or to the occurrences of a few years; or, on the 
other hand, it may stretch over the centuries, seeking in past 
generations the distant conditions from which sprang finally some 
great event; or, again, it may strive to connect with the phe- 
nomena of our modern times remote causes which are dimly dis- 
cerned in the dawn of civilization, and in this way establish a law 
which shall govern the entire movement of humanity. 



IO PREFACE 

It is this search for cause and effect which has been the 
distinguishing feature of historical work in the nineteenth cen- 
tury. No doubt the practice has existed, sporadically at least, 
since history began to be written; but in the last century it be- 
came the dominant note, the ruling characteristic to which all 
writers aspired, although naturally with varying degrees of suc- 
cess. That which concerns us now is to try to estimate approxi- 
mately to what point the increased knowledge, the multiplied 
observations and the system of seeking cause and effect have 
brought us on the road to fulfilling the highest function of 
history. We can see very readily that in the explanation of the 
past and the present much has been achieved. For example, the 
causes which led to the revolt of the American colonies against 
England, or to the French Revolution, have been studied not only 
in the immediately preceding years, but have been patiently 
tracked through the centuries, and sought not merely in political 
and economic conditions, but in the qualities, habits and charac- 
teristics of the people and in the attributes and ethnic peculiarities 
of the stocks from which these historic races were formed. The 
time when it was possible to treat great and violent changes of 
this kind as isolated events, growing suddenly out of surrounding 
conditions, has passed away never to return. 

Having thus reached the point where it is not only possible 
but habitual to explain philosophically and on logical principles a 
past event, it is but a short step to find in past events, properly 
arranged and treated, the explanation of the present in any given 
country or in any group of countries similar, if not identical, in 
race and in the character of their civilization. It is also true that 
modern history, advancing from the explanation of a given event 
or of an important era by tracing its causes through a long suc- 
cession of years, has gone on to the work of following out through 
the entire historic period tendencies of thought or art, of litera- 
ture or morals, as well as the religious, economic and political 
movements of mankind. The results of these investigations have 
been more illuminating probably than anything else which has 
been accomplished. From these researches, which have embraced 
anthropology, philology, psychology, literature and archaeology, 
as well as history proper, a brilliant light has been cast upon much 
that before seemed shrouded in hopeless darkness, and a multitude 



PREFACE 1 1 

of problems which puzzled the will and baffled the imagination 
have been made plain. From this source has come the theory of 
myths and folklore; the development of the identity of certain 
fundamental religious beliefs in all the many families of mankind; 
the reduction to a very small number of the absolutely different 
races of men; a knowledge of the often unexplained migra- 
tions of vast bodies of people, of the economic conditions, the 
trade, the commerce, the industries and the discoveries of mineral, 
which have played such a large and so often a controlling part in 
human affairs, and of the military and political attributes and 
tendencies which have so largely, in appearance at least, deter- 
mined the fate of States and empires. 

Yet the final question is still unanswered. The world still 
awaits a theory or an explanation of the movement of mankind as 
a whole which shall make clear the entire past, show whence we 
have come, why we have proceeded as has actually been the case, 
whither we are going and whither we must go, by a proof as 
relentless as the fall of the apple to the ground, which, as we 
assert, conclusively demonstrates what we call the law of gravi- 
tation. 

To reach this ultimate goal we must have a theory of the 
universe, and the necessity of such a theory has been perceived 
more or less dimly or more or less clearly by all serious historians 
from the time when history first began to be written with any 
other purpose than that of making a brief abstract and chronicle 
of the time. The theory of the universe and of life upon which 
historians proceeded either deliberately or unconsciously down 
to the latter half of the eighteenth century was, broadly speaking, 
the theological theory. The doctrines, the dogmas and the 
formulas of theologians and priests, furnished the underlying 
theory upon which historians worked out their results, and this 
was as true of the East as of the West, of Asia as of Europe, of the 
writers of antiquity as of the schoolmen of the Middle Ages. In 
the last analysis history fell back upon theology, and accepted its 
formulas and its philosophy as giving the final answer whenever 
the historian sought to set forth an explanation of man's existence 
upon earth, or to show the connection and relation of events in 
the life of humanity. 



12 PREFACE 

In the eighteenth century the spirit of skepticism and inquiry 
rose up and took possession of the thought of Western civiliza- 
tion. In dealing with history its resources were meagre, its mate- 
rial was limited and its methods crude. Voltaire, who represented 
that skeptical spirit in its most powerful and concentrated form, 
and who exercised a wide and profound influence to a degree 
which it is now difficult even to imagine, was simply destructive. 
He struck at the theological conceptions and explanations of past 
events with penetrating force and with weapons of the keenest 
edge, but the simplicity of his attack is only equaled by his 
ignorance of the real meaning of the traditions and habits of 
thought at which he aimed his blows. None the less the work of 
the eighteenth century was effective so far as it went. It tore the 
theological theories of the universe to tatters and scattered the 
fragments to the four winds of heaven. It was unable to replace 
that which it destroyed, but it cleared the ground, and to this 
inheritance the next century succeeded. The old theories were 
discredited. The way was open to construct a new one. 

The nineteenth century was pre-eminently scientific. Science 
during that period was the ruling force in the domain of 
thought, and its discoveries and advances are the monuments 
of its marvelous success. But its influence has spread far be- 
yond its own province. In every direction the methods of sci- 
ence have been adopted and its standards set up as the best 
methods and the loftiest standards for all forms of thought and 
inquiry. History, therefore, during the last hundred years has 
sought to make itself and to call itself scientific as the highest 
quality at which it could aim; and the devotion to facts, the search 
for truth at all costs, the rigid deductions, coldly regardless of 
sentiment or prejudice, have all been attributes borrowed from 
science and of immense value to historical results. The study of 
history pursued in this way, and carried into adjoining fields of 
research like anthropology, archaeology and philology, has 
brought about a complete readjustment of many of our ideas as 
to the development of man and his relations to the universe. 
Indeed, it is scarcely realized how penetrating the influence of 
history governed by scientific methods has been, and what a 
revolution it has wrought, for the most part quite insensibly, in all 
our conceptions as to the existence, meaning and fate of the 
human race. 



PREFACE 13 

That this has been accomplished at a loss and a serious loss 
to history as literature, can hardly be denied. Modern history 
of the purely scientific and judicial variety has thus far been 
unable to sustain the literary glories of the past. Thucydides 
and Tacitus and Gibbon were by no means wanting in a theory 
of the universe or of the life of man. They were masters of 
their subjects and of their material, but they were also most 
distinctly philosophers, reasoners and thinkers, although not 
given over to modern scientific methods; yet they still stand 
alone and unrivaled in literature, and would wonder greatly 
to be told that we cannot have serious history or a philosophy of 
life until we cease to be picturesque. They would marvel even 
more to be told that it is the fashion to hold that we must be 
"judicial" to the point of never taking sides, and usually of sus- 
taining a paradox; that if we would really be historians we must 
assume that the accepted opinion is wrong because it is accepted, 
and must close our eyes firmly to the splendid pageant of the 
years which have gone if we would win the praise of the anti- 
quarian, the specialist or the learned society. We owe much to 
the adoption of scientific methods in history; but if we give way 
to the intolerable dogma that history in order to be really 
scientific must divest itself of all connection with literature, it 
would be better never to have attempted those methods and to 
have blundered along in the old way. When Mr. Bury, the 
Regius Professor of History at Oxford, announces "that history 
is not a branch of literature" he advances a proposition which if 
adopted would kill history, and which could by no possibility give 
us science in its place. Imagination is no doubt one important 
quality among others in the really great men of science, but it is 
absolutely essential to the great historian, for without imagination 
no history worthy of the name can be written. Very valuable re- 
sults can be achieved without it in the physical sciences, because 
their phenomena are devoid of the spiritual and emotional ele- 
ments; but the history of man is in large measure governed or 
modified by passion, sentiment and emotion, and cannot be gauged 
or understood without the sympathy and the perception which only 
imagination and the dramatic instinct can give. Moreover, his- 
tory is utterly vain unless men can learn something from it; they 
cannot learn unless they read, and they will neither read nor 



14 PREFACE 

understand unless the theory or the doctrine drawn forth from the 
winnowed facts is presented to them with all the grace and force 
which style can give and with all the resources of a beautiful literary 
art. The worst enemies of scientific methods are those who 
would, in the name of science, reduce history to a sifted dust heap 
and who decry the art of literature because they cannot master it, 
although without it history has never yet been written and never 
will be able to speak to men or to give them the explanation of 
their existence if that great secret is ever discovered in all its com- 
pleteness. 

But the literary side of historical development, and without 
which it cannot continue, is not, after all, what concerns us here 
further than to point out its absolute necessity, if we would 
effect anything of lasting worth. It is in the achievements of 
modern scientific history, not yet ruined by its unreasoning 
devotees, that we must look for the dial hand of progress; and 
however dryly the fashion of the moment or personal incapacity 
may have compelled historians to state the conclusions thus 
reached, there are to be found the latest steps which have been 
taken toward the goal of that history which shall give us, if such 
a thing is possible, the full explanation which we seek. It is 
along the lines followed by modern history that we must proceed 
in our quest, but thus far these lines have been separate. One 
subject or one tendency has in turn and each by itself been traced 
out from the beginning, and the theory or law which has governed 
in each case has frequently been evolved and stated with the 
utmost care and acuteness. But the lines have not yet con- 
verged, the theories have not yet been grouped, the various laws 
still await the genius who shall cast them into a code. 

The stupendous difficulties of the task must not be under- 
estimated. Perhaps it is beyond the power of man to develop 
and state a great law of life, a comprehensive theory of the uni- 
verse, when he must perforce rest it not merely upon a vast mass 
of recorded observations and classified facts, but must throughout 
allow for what no other scientific man need make allowance — the 
unending perturbations caused by human passion, human emotion 
and unreasoning animal instincts. One thing alone is certain: no 
single theory dealing with one set of facts and one set of passions 
and tendencies can ever explain everything. The forces which 



PREFACE 15 

have started the great migrations, the religious passions, the 
political aptitudes, can each explain much; the economic move- 
ment can probably explain more than any single clue, and yet 
no one of them alone is sufficient to make clear all that has hap- 
pened and weave the many threads into a final answer to< the riddle 
of the Sphinx, who waits and watches by the roadside as the pro- 
cession of mankind marches by in endless files. 

Yet is there here no reason for discouragement. Every 
failure of a proper attempt to reach that final and complete solu- 
tion of the great enigma which history alone can give, if it is ever 
to be given at all, has advanced us in knowledge. It is much 
better to look at what has been accomplished than to sigh over the 
undone, fold our hands in despair and content ourselves by saying, 
like the scientific professor of history, that all we can do is to heap 
up more facts for distant generations to use. The answer may not 
yet have been found; but the light is growing brighter, and the 
prospect of attaining to a complete reply, if no nearer, seems at 
least clearer than ever before. Even to realize where we fall short 
is, if not very hopeful, very instructive, and opens the only possible 
path to future success. 

The theological theory, then, which was so long dominant 
has been swept away and history has fallen under the control of 
scientific processes. It has not only assimilated its methods to 
those of science, but it has striven to deduce from its own phe- 
nomena the doctrines which science in the latter half of the nine- 
teenth century adopted and promulgated. It has, in short, sub- 
stituted for the theological theory that of science. So far as it 
has had any definite purpose it has aimed to show, like the science 
of the last fifty years, that the true explanation of man's existence 
and movements is mechanical; that at bottom we must fall back 
on the "fortuitous concourse of atoms," and that a continuous 
evolution is the sole guide in the maze of human affairs as it has 
been partially shown to be in the animal world. And now, even 
while history is advancing on these lines, science is pausing in 
doubt, the mechanical theory seems to be breaking down, the 
"fortuitous concourse of atoms" is being abandoned, the limita- 
tions of evolution are becoming constantly clearer, the younger 
biologists no longer trust implicitly the dogmas of the later years, 
and Lord Kelvin announces that the last word of the latest sci- 



l6 ' PREFACE 

ence indicates a reversion to the doctrine of a governing law. Is 
history to go on in the old ways, which but yesterday were new, 
or is it to pause, as science has paused, and turn again, not to the 
old theological theory, but to one which involves a general and 
permanent law of the universe and of life? 

What has history herself to say, speaking from her own ex- 
perience and enlightened by her own efforts? What have the 
profound research and acute deductions of these later years to pro- 
duce by way of solving the problem of what her future course 
shall be? Has history been able to show a process of evolution 
so continuous as at once to demonstrate that men from the begin- 
ning, despite many aberrations, have moved along one line, com- 
pelled thereto by environment and by their physical and mental 
structure, thus proving that humanity has been governed by 
mechanical processes as completely as science very recently held 
all physical developments to be, whether in the heavens above or 
in the earth beneath? Or, on the other hand, has history, like 
science, apparently failed to maintain the mechanical theory and 
found the "fortuitous concourse of atoms" insufficient to support 
the facts which she herself has brought to light? Has the Dar- 
winian doctrine of evolution as applied to the events of history 
disclosed limitations there also which make it appear incomplete 
and at best tentative? 

Looking broadly at the situation as it is to-day, the story of 
man upon earth seems to fall into two divisions, the prehistoric 
and the historic periods. The earliest knowledge that can in 
any proper sense be called historical, or which rests upon records 
of any sort, is imparted to us by the remains of the civilizations of 
Egypt, Mesopotamia and Western Asia. These civilizations, as 
disclosed to us by the latest archaeological discoveries, appear to 
have been substantially at the point where we ourselves were a 
century ago, and if not complete were certainly in a stage of 
high development. How and by what processes that position was 
reached we do not and probably can never know. A long road 
certainly had been traveled before it was attained. The start- 
ing point is dim. The earliest human skulls which have been 
found do not differ more widely in size and shape from the 
skulls of men to-day than the skulls of several actually existent 
races vary from each other. They leave the gulf which yawns 



PREFACE 17 

between the skulls of races now existent and the most highly 
developed ape substantially unbridged and undiminished. Man, 
therefore, as we know him, is not fundamentally different physi- 
cally from the earliest progenitor who can be distinctly recog- 
nized as a man, a human being in our sense of the word. But 
the gap between the earliest man known to us, between the 
man of the drift or the shell heap, for instance, and the neolithic 
man is immense, although it is trifling compared to the chasm 
which separates the man of flints from the man who lived under 
the earliest Egyptian dynasties, who reared the first buildings by 
the Nile, or who constructed the first palaces of Babylonia, 
drained the streets and houses of her cities and codified her laws. 
We find man at the outset with nothing apparently except the 
discovery of fire, although we must infer a period when even the 
use of fire was unknown; and then we find him with weapons of 
stone, at first rudely and then ingeniously worked; with pottery 
and with indications of some use of metals in the form of pins or 
copper models of stone implements for war or the chase. Then we 
plunge into darkness again, and when we emerge we behold a 
man possessed of language and written characters, who has organ- 
ized society and government and enacted laws; who has invented 
the wheel for locomotion, mastered the application of animal or 
muscular power; who has developed a splendid architecture and 
a noble art; who understands engineering, carries on an exten- 
sive commerce, marshals armies and conducts wars with ordered 
legions. The distance to the man who could do all this from the 
man who applied and controlled fire, the greatest single discovery 
ever made, and from the later man who was able to chip stone, 
fabricate weapons and make pottery staggers imagination when 
we strive to guess at what had happened and been accomplished 
in the interval. We seem to pass at a single bound from the dimly 
conceived being who, stark naked or dressed perhaps in skins, 
was savage to a degree beyond our power of description, and 
who waged an unequal war with monstrous animals, to men who 
are so like us in comparison with what had gone before that it 
seems as if the solemn Egyptian kings and the makers of the 
winged bulls were our own kin and lived but yesterday instead 
of dwelling on the misty verge of recorded time. In that long 
interval which elapsed between the earliest trace of man onward 



l8 PREFACE 

and upward from the discovery of fire to the time of these 
ancient civilizations, what happened? By what steps has man, or 
rather certain tribes and races of men, climbed to such a height? 
We do not know, probably we never shall know more than reason- 
able conjecture can tell; yet the inference seems irresistible, inevit- 
able we may almost say, that during that period of darkness there 
was a steady process of evolution advancing slowly but surely by 
the discovery and development of forces which radically changed 
the environment and all the conditions surrounding the race to a 
position where man had essentially all that he possessed a hundred 
years ago. These ancient civilizations and their successors ripen 
as we approach the Christian era. Their art was refined, their 
language was perfected, their literature attained to imperishable 
beauty; they widened their geography and increased the sum of 
knowledge, but there was no' radical change of environment, 
there were no new forces to compel such a change. In the earliest 
civilizations really known to us we find that men had arms and 
arts, architecture and letters, organized government and systems 
of laws, commerce, war, armies, means of transportation by land 
and water. All these things they perfected down to the fall of 
the Roman empire; but they added no new force like fire or the 
wheel, like linguistic symbols or organized society, such as they 
had brought slowly forth in the prehistoric days. 

When the empire of Rome went to pieces Western Europe 
sank into a period of anarchy, in which all the arts, whether orna- 
mental or economic, and all forms of organization retrograded, 
and the period known as the Dark Ages set in. The traditions 
of science and learning, of literature and art, were kept alive only 
by Byzantium in the East, where they were destined to disappear 
under the onset of the Ottoman Turks and by the Moors in Spain. 
Slowly and painfully new systems, new States and a new social 
order were evolved from the welter of destruction which followed 
the downfall of Rome; and out of these new movements came 
at last the Renaissance, the revival of learning, the junction 
of the present with the classical past and thence modern civiliza- 
tion. But through all these chances and changes, alike through 
the rise and fall of Egypt and Chaldea, of Assyria and Persia, 
through the supremacy of Greece and the final dominion of Rome, 
as well as through the Middle Ages and the growth of our modern 



PREFACE 19 

civilization, there was no fundamental change in the conditions 
and achievements such as we find indicated at the close of the 
prehistoric period. No new forces had come into play to alter 
the development of man. States and empires had waxed and 
waned; there had been great migrations of people, great shiftings 
of the center of military, political and economic power. We can 
trace these movements, we know their causes, we understand the 
influence of mineral wealth and of trade routes, but the founda- 
tions are undisturbed. In the eighteenth century, as in the time 
of the earliest Egyptian dynasty, men still depend on themselves 
and on animals as the source of power; they have the wheel for 
transportation, the written word for communication; they reap 
and sow and build and have literature and the fine arts. The 
bounds of knowledge have widened, broadening far in the days 
of Greece and Rome, and then contracting after the fall of the 
empire only to widen again after the fourteenth century and then 
stretch farther and farther out with each succeeding year. Still 
there is no vital change. The art of war is revolutionized by the 
introduction of gunpower, the acquisition of knowledge by the 
invention of printing; but these two things apart, the man of the 
eighteenth century does not differ essentially from the Egyptian 
and the Babylonian, from the Greek or the Roman, in the condi- 
tions of life or in his relations to the earth and his fellow-men. 
He still travels with the horse on land and with the wind or the 
oar at sea. His journeys are still along paths and trails and roads 
or by canals, rivers and ocean. He knows the earth and its extent 
more completely than the Roman, but it is probable the roads and 
methods of communication were better under Rome so far as they 
extended at all than they were a hundred years ago. One civiliza- 
tion has succeeded another, new States have risen, old ones flour- 
ished and decayed; the economic equilibrium has shifted and trade 
routes have altered, carrying prosperity to one kingdom and ruin 
to another; the fine arts have taken on new forms and develop- 
ments among different people, have touched the heights, blazed 
with splendor and gone out only to shine again in some new home. 
But still there has been no fundamental change. No empire, no 
State, no civilization seems to have passed beyond a certain point 
which others had already achieved. The scene shifts, the accesso- 
ries change, but the drama is the same. If there had been a steady 



20 PREFACE 

and scientific evolution in the prehistoric period, after the close of 
that period the evolution of the most highly developed portions 
of mankind seems to have ceased. The movements are all spo- 
radic, and never get beyond the point which the most ancient 
civilization, when it emerges from the darkness to greet our eyes, 
had in all essential things already at hand. There is no indication 
that man has improved physically since the day when history 
began. That he has advanced in his moral attributes and concep- 
tions under the influence of religion we can hardly refuse to be- 
lieve, if we would, and the facts by any test furnish sufficient proof 
that man's attitude to his fellows is finer and better even if we have 
improved in no other way. On the other hand, although we know 
more, there can be no doubt that man is no stronger as an intel- 
lectual being than he was when Plato taught and Sophocles com- 
posed his tragedies, when Phidias carved and Zeuxis painted and 
Pericles fought and governed. In the fine arts, indeed, it is diffi- 
cult to see that, except in rare instances, man has ever attained a 
higher standard in sculpture or architecture of which alone we are 
able to judge with certainty than he reached in the earliest civili- 
zation. 

It must always be carefully borne in mind that there is a 
broad distinction between the elaboration or perfection of an 
existing art or a discovered force and the successive introduction 
of new forces which lead on to a different structure of society 
and to conditions wholly different from what has gone before. 
The latter is a true scientific evolution, no matter how infinitesimal 
the advance or how slow the movement which destroys the unfit 
and causes the survival of those fittest to survive. The mere 
elaboration or perfection of existent arts and forces, although they 
may exhibit in a distinctly limited way the operations of the laws of 
evolution, do not, in the broad scientific sense, constitute a race 
evolution, which can supply us with an explanation of the develop- 
ment of the race as a whole, or with a theory of the universe or of 
life. The discovery of the means by which fire could be applied 
and controlled whenever it occurred changed all the conditions 
surrounding the race of men. It was a true evolutionary step in 
the development of the race, and the Promethean myth shows how 
the tremendous impression of its effects survived through ages the 
length of which we cannot calculate. The same may be said of 



PREFACE 21 

the application of animal power, of the invention of written sym- 
bols, of the organization of society, of the art of building. But 
the elaboration and perfection of architecture, the refinement of 
written characters into a literature, the increase of size in boats or 
vessels when propulsion by wind or muscle had once been dis- 
covered are not an evolutionary progress of the race in any true 
sense, nor do they furnish a general law to explain the entire 
mystery of humanity. The men who first discovered the process 
of making bricks, and then the further possibility of so putting 
stones or bricks together as to make a permanent structure to 
shelter their gods, their dead or their living, took a long step on 
the path of evolution. But this step once taken, the men who 
built the temples of Egypt or of Nippur or the Lion Gate of 
Mycense, the Parthenon of Athens, the Colosseum of Rome, or 
the Gothic cathedrals of France were expressing the same 
invention in different forms, but they were not carrying forward 
at all the evolution of the race. These forms of surpassing 
strength, grandeur and beauty were evolved, no doubt, from the 
principles of the rude beginnings which constituted the scien- 
tifically evolutionary step; but it was the original discovery which 
was evolutionary and not the refinement and elaboration which 
followed and which failed to change the fundamental conditions of 
the race. It is very essential to keep clearly in mind the distinc- 
tion between the evolution of the race, as a whole, through a vital 
change in environment and conditions necessitating a correspond- 
ing adaptation and alteration in the life of man and in the organi- 
zation of society on the one hand, and the evolution of a given art 
or society or of an economic structure or political state on the 
other. From the discovery of the means by which a fire could be 
kindled and controlled to the lamps of the Roman or the Greek 
is a long process of evolution in the use of fire, but does not touch 
the general evolution of the race. The original discovery changed 
vitally the conditions which surrounded man and forced him into 
a new environment to which he was obliged slowly to adapt him- 
self, but the improvements and extensions of the use of fire had in 
themselves no such effect. The process by which men advanced 
from picture writing to the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes 
is of great importance in the evolution of language, but it was the 
invention of a symbol for human speech which altered the environ- 



22 PREFACE 

ment of man and not the improvements and developments of such 
symbols. The secret we would wring from the past is not the law 
governing the evolution of any particular state or people, of any 
especial art or form of social organization, but what the forces are 
in their union which have changed the environment of humanity 
and which will give, us a law that explains the entire movement of 
the race, solves the mystery of existence and defines with a single 
answer man's relation to the universe. We can readily understand 
the difference between the essentially evolutionary step and that 
which is only an elaboration of a discovery already made if we can 
imagine the world divested of all that has come into it through 
the agency of steam and electricity and then contrast it with that 
which existed under the ancient civilizations. The men who sepa- 
rated the American colonies from England and carried through 
the revolution in France, which together changed the entire 
political system of America and Western Europe, possessed gun- 
powder and printing, but beyond these two things they did not 
differ essentially in their environment from the men of the 
ancient civilizations. Like the Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Greek 
and the Roman, they still depended upon the muscles of men and 
animals or on the wind, the rivers or the tides for power. They 
propelled their boats by sails or oars, they traveled on horseback; 
and in war and peace their transport rested on wheels, which 
they caused to revolve by the force of draft animals or of men. 
After developing new forms of architecture they had reverted to 
the ancient models, and it may be safely said that they never 
surpassed the work of the builders of the Parthenon or of the 
tombs and temples of Egypt. Modern engineering has yet to 
show whether it can rival the Pyramids, or outdo the engineers 
whose lofty bridge over the Gard still stands with its tiers of 
arches, after nineteen hundred years, absolutely plumb, and along 
which 

" Men might march on nor be pressed 
Twelve abreast." 

How much of our pavement will remain after two thousand 
years? There are miles of Roman pavement still to be found 
scattered over Europe from Italy to Scotland. How much better 
is our system of water supply than that which the great aqueducts 
striding across the plains brought to Rome and to her provincial 



PREFACE 23 

< 

towns? Have we improved materially upon the Cloaca Maxima 
or the almost perfect arched drain in the deepest excavation of 
Nippur? Have we carried architecture or painting or sculpture 
further than it was carried in Egypt or in Greece? We may go 
over the whole field and the results will be everywhere the same, 
and all alike will point to the same conclusion, that from the 
earliest civilizations historically known to us down to the close of 
the eighteenth century there had been no change in environment 
and conditions sufficient to warrant the assertion of a continuous 
evolution such as we must have if we are to find in it a general 
law and complete explanation. The stream of civilization rises 
and falls, plunges out of sight in one place and reappears in an- 
other, but it never cuts new channels or reaches a higher plane 
or flows with a broader current than at first. Evolution of 
the race in the sense in which it is used here must go steadily 
forward without a break, compelled thereto by successive radical 
changes in race environment. No matter how minute or how 
slow the advance it cannot stand still; and variety alone or mere 
shifting of place is not advance, although it may be movement. 
Thus it seems, speaking broadly, that during the historic period 
and down to the closing years of the eighteenth century there 
has been no true race evolution in the proper sense of the word 
or in the manner in which we may reasonably infer it to have 
existed and proceeded down to the time of historical records. 
It would seem, if this be true, that there are marked limitations 
upon the doctrine of evolution in history as there are in science, 
and the difficulty is one which history itself must meet. 

But there is a still further difficulty if we consider the period 
just preceding the present day, for there we find strong evidence 
of a resumption of the real evolutionary movement of the race if 
we may assume that such a movement went on in prehistoric 
times; and history is in this way confronted with the demand that 
it should enunciate some law which shall cover not only the 
periods of evolution, but also the space filled with intense activity 
in which no evolution took place. This demand becomes ap- 
parent if we examine closely the very latest period in the life of 
humanity, the one through which we have been and are at this 
moment passing. To make clear what this latest period means it 
is necessary briefly to summarize and restate the proposition which 



24 PREFACE 

has just been laid down. We find man at the opening of the nine- 
teenth century with a vastly extended knowledge, with greatly ad- 
vanced methods of killing other animals, including himself, and 
with highly improved machinery for transmitting and diffusing his 
knowledge through the medium of printed speech. Otherwise 
he does not differ in any radical manner from his predecessor on 
the upper Nile, in the temples of Nippur, the streets of Bactra, 
or within the walls of Tiryns or Mycenae. To men in this condi- 
tion came suddenly two new forces in the practical application of 
steam as power, and of electricity first as a means of transmitting 
thought and knowledge and then as a form of power also. These 
new forces have changed the face of the world and radically 
altered human conditions, creating a wholly new environment, 
by the quickening of transportation and communication and by 
bringing the whole earth so easily within the grasp of the domi- 
nant races that it is nearly all reduced to possession in name and 
will soon be so in reality. There is need to point out or dwell 
upon the marvels which have thus been wrought out or the social 
and political revolutions which have been effected. Gunpowder 
and printing worked social and political revolutions in their time 
also. The important point for us now is that under the mastery 
of these new forces, which have produced a new environment, 
another period of regular and scientific evolution has apparently 
set in; and the new movement, which is chiefly economic and 
social, has gone on not only with regularity, but with an acceler- 
ated momentum which is little short of appalling. Here, under 
these new forces, we are not carrying the well-understood civili- 
zation of the past five thousand or six thousand years once 
more to a pitch of splendor, but we are producing a civilization 
and a social system wholly different from what has gone before. 
To speak more exactly, we are pushing forward the civilization 
we have inherited from the countless centuries beyond all the 
former limits and on to heights or depths never before touched. 
The phenomena of this resultant of the new forces are largely 
economic on the surface, but they are at bottom not only eco- 
nomic but social. We are creatures of habit, and we still express 
the new forces in terms of the only power the race knew for many 
thousands of years; but what we have actually done is to change 
the world from the horse to the engine, from the man to the 



PREFACE 25 

machine. We are rapidly increasing this force estimated in horse 
power until it lias already gone well-nigh beyond imagination. 
And still we are increasing it, still concentrating the whole move- 
ment of the world and the daily life of humanity on the production 
of machine power, heedless alike of the velocity at which we are 
traveling, or the fact that a single break at any point might mean 
ruin and desolation such as the world has never known. Armed 
with this power we are tearing out the resources of the earth with 
entire disregard of the future, and heaping up wealth in a profusion 
and in masses such as the world never before imagined even in its 
dreams. 

But the one fact more important than any other is that a 
process of steady evolution, owing to a change in the conditions 
surrounding- humanity, seems to be again in progress. Can his- 
tory explain this present time in which we are passing beyond any 
civilization hitherto known, borne on by new and untried forces, 
or predict the future which this present portends? Can history, 
with the assistance of archaeology, anthropology, geology and the 
rest, do this and by researches in the prehistoric times, when 
there must have been evolution, owing to radical discoveries and 
changes and by the local and limited evolution in specific cases in 
modern times, tell us the manner in which this new evolutionary 
power is going to work? Are we to infer that because the move- 
ment of our own time appears to rest upon the conservation, con- 
centration and control of energy and upon the development of 
natural forces to that end that therefore the movement of pre- 
historic times must have had the same evolutionary process at 
work and that here we are to find at last the clue to the develop- 
ment of the race? Can history bring all the periods within the 
operation of one harmonious law and the scope of a single ex- 
planation? The purely mechanical theory of the universe seems 
to have broken down under science. It has also failed apparently 
to explain finally and completely the history of man. Must his- 
tory, like science, return upon her steps and seek for some new 
governing law which shall succeed where dogma was defeated and 
where evolution fell short of the final goal? A new period, bring- 
ing with it forces and conditions hitherto unknown, confronts 
modern history. Unless she can solve the problem it presents, 
unless she can bring forth a theory of the universe and of life which 



26 PREFACE 

shall take up the past and from it read the riddle of the present 
and draw aside the veil of the future, then history in its highest 
sense has failed. To the men of the twentieth century comes the 
opportunity to make the effort which shall convert failure to 
success if success be possible. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

IIIIflMMfflf 

iIMWH'W'HIfll 

■iiiJllll 

018 485 521 5 » 



